Many thanks for Continuum/T & T Clark for a review copy – and for the benefit of full disclosure, the link above is through the Amazon Associates program.

This review has been coming for some time. I apologize that it’s later that one would have hoped. But even after a couple months, I’m still quite excited about this book. Paul Danove has provided us with a comprehensive survey of the semantics of transference verbs in the New Testament along with a short lexicon summarizing the results of his tremendous effort.

Some of my readers already know that this is his second book related to this issue (semantic roles, verbs & the lexicon) and that Danove has also published numerous articles examining a variety of verbs over the past two decades. His previous book focused on the verbs & prepositions for in the Gospel of Mark. That was, indeed, a huge undertaking, but at the same time, had its own issues arising from the rather limited size of the corpus.

And that is exactly what makes this second book significant: Danove has attempted to cover an entire semantic class of verbs for the Greek New Testament: Verbs of Transferences.

As a whole the book consists of ten chapters and four appendices. Theoretically, the first two chapters are both the most significant and also the most difficult. Danove has developed a highly complex system of semantic features for distinguishing each verb. From there the following seven chapters survey and analysis the semantics & syntax of all the verbs in question in their argument structure as well as their semantic content. The final chapters provide the lexicon developed from the analysis.

In what follows, I will focus my attention on the first two chapters in detail and then provide a more focused look at representative sections of the rest of the book where the rubber hits the road for theory & method both in the analysis as well as in the Lexicon. Excluding this short introduction, this will be a three part review. Part I will appear tomorrow, Part II on Friday, and Part III on Saturday. I’ve already written up half of the review and will be doing the rest on Friday and Saturday.